A body free from disease, a commission in a marching regiment, a methodistical, _exigeante_ old mother. These would seem but a poor _chétif_ list of subjects of thankfulness to Fortune's curled and perfumed darlings. "Your acquaintance amongst old ladies must be extensive to justify you in that last statement," says Esther, with a smile. "The best woman I know, then." "It is a pity that when you went, like Coelebs, in search of a wife, you did not try to find some one more like her," rejoins Esther, piqued and surprised, despite her utter indifference to his opinion of her, at finding that, notwithstanding the imbecile pitch of love for herself at which she believes him to have arrived, he can still set a dowdy, havering, brown old woman on a pedestal, above even that which she, with all the radiant red and white beauty of which she is so calmly aware, all the triumph of her seventeen sweet summers, occupies in his heart. "You are young and she is old," says Robert, encouragingly; "I don't see why you should not be like her when you are her age." "I think not; I hope not," says Miss Craven, coolly, strangling her twenty-fifth yawn. "Without meaning any insult to Mrs. Brandon, I should be sorry to think that, at any period of my life, I should be a mere reproduction of some one else." Another long pause. (Have we been here an hour yet?) The brown bees go humming, droning, lumbering about, velvet-coated: a high-shouldered grasshopper chirps shrilly: the dim air vibrates. "Just listen to that cricket!" says Esther, presently, for the sake of saying something. "How noisy he is! I read in a book the other day that if a man's voice were as strong in proportion to his size as a locust's, he could be heard from here to St. Petersburg." "Could he?" says Bob, absently, not much interested in his betrothed's curious little piece of entomological information; "how unpleasant!" Then dragging himself along the grass and the flowers still closer to her feet, he says, "Esther, mother hopes to see a great deal more of you now than she has done hitherto." "Does she? she is very good, I am sure," answers Esther, formally, with a feeling of compunction at her utter inability to echo the wish. "She bid me tell you that she hopes you will come in as often as you can of an evening. We are all sure to be at home then; the girls read aloud by turns, and mother thought that----" "That it might improve my mind, and that it needs improving," interrupts Esther, smiling drily; "so it does. I quite agree with her; but not even for that object could I leave Jack of an evening; he is out all day long, and the evening is the only time when I have him to myself." "You find plenty to say to _him_ always, I suppose?" says Robert, with an involuntary sigh and slight stress upon the word _him_. "Not a word, sometimes. We sit opposite or beside each other in sociable silence."